UN Targets Sustainable Energy

The United Nations General Assembly has declared 2012 as International Year of Sustainable Energy for All.

It
is recognition that affordable, renewable energy is necessary for the
world to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

The
MDGs are made up of eight target areas where vast improvement is needed
by a deadline of 2015 in order to significantly improve poverty,
disease, illiteracy, human rights abuses and environmental degradation.

The
UN has been designating “International Years” since 1959 in order to
draw attention to, and mobilize action on, major global issues.

In
this case, half the world’s population live without the availability of
modern energy, cooking on open fires, having no or intermittent
electricity and having little or no access to appliances and
electronics.

UN projections show that this situation,
given the level of current investment and programming, is not going to
change soon and, in fact, may worsen as population levels grow faster
than access.

In the area of maternal health, one of the MDG
targets, there exists a stark contrast between the situation of women
in wealthy countries like ours and abjectly poor rural areas in
sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Of all the 2015
Goals, this one has experienced the least progress and still half a
million women die each year, 99% of them in the developing world, due
to “complications” associated with pregnancy, childbirth and the first
months after birth.

Many blame a lack of access to
modern technology and energy as the major cause of this tragic
situation. For instance, there is no way to power adequate
lighting during childbirth. Consider your local hospital with the
lights suddenly going off.

What would ensue?

While electrification is a high-level priority in today’s world, what is being done is “macro-development,”
that is the building of large power stations and dams that tie into
cities, factories and businesses, and not into slums, villages and
those living without power (both natural and political).

What
is needed, says Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, along with major grid
initiatives, is small-scale, locally led development: micro hydro
electric installations, bio-gas and solar efforts, and fuel-efficient
stoves for ordinary people.

Getting on the UN’s sustainable
energy bandwagon is the popular band Linkin Park (a favourite of mine
and a two-time Grammy Award-winning American rock group), as part of
the “Music for Relief” campaign.

One of their
initiatives is encouraging people to donate $10 to supply families in
Haiti with solar powered light bulbs. People in many poor
countries use candles and kerosene for light, both fire hazards.
Open fires can also cause smoke-related asthma and other long-term
breathing problems.

Light bulbs, meanwhile, allow for reading and studying for school, which open fires do not.

As
well, the continued use of bio-mass (trees, dung) to create energy by
billions of humans will contribute to the problems of climate change,
desertification and even conflict as people burn wood, denude the
landscape and fight over what is left.

Linkin Park has also
pledged – through its Power the World program - to work with a number
of international partners to help bring sustainable energy solutions to
one million families. In Haiti, they are supporting small-scale,
clean energy entrepreneurs, a way of helping the poor set up small
businesses while selling products that will have a long-term
benefit.

Internationally, between 2005 and 2010, the
number of countries with policies on renewable energy doubled to one
hundred, while the cost of the necessary technologies dropped and the
investment in those technologies rose.

So, there is definitely hope.

In
this Year of Sustainable Energy for All, the UN aims to make access to
clean energy at all levels of society a goal for all of its member
nations and to create networks of financiers, practitioners and
stakeholders to make sure it happens.

Given the challenge of climate change, it is in all of our interests to commit ourselves to sustainable energy.

Given
the 2015 deadline of the Millennium Development Goals, progress must be
made among the poorest of the poor, where the greatest need really
lies.

The large institutions or businesses, and the
millions of small villages around the world must all have access to –
and see as a priority – using forms of energy that renew, rather than
deplete, our world’s future.

So, it is the perfect marriage of altruism and self-interest – to make 2012 the Year of Sustainable Energy for All.